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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
May 15, 2001 #01-13 NIEHS CONTACT:
Bill Grigg (301) 402-3378 15 May 2001: DDT, PCBs Not Linked to Higher Rates of Breast Cancer, an Analysis of Five Northeast Studies ConcludesScientists who combined data from five large breast cancer studies have found no link to the pesticide DDT or to PCBs, a widespread industrial chemical. Both were suspect because they are chemicals in the environment with similarities to estrogen, the so-called female hormone associated with a risk of breast cancer. The five studies were funded in 1993 by the National Cancer Institute (http://www.cancer.gov/) Today that explanation was dashed as scientists analyzing the combined data also concluded that neither exposure explains the high rates of breast cancer in the U.S. Northeast. Their results appear in the May 16 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/) The women in the five studies totaled 1,400 breast cancer patients and 1,642 controls. Two of the studies were conducted among women in New York state, one was in Connecticut, and one was in Maryland. Half the women in the fifth study, the nationwide Nurses Health Study (http://www.channing.harvard.edu/nhs/) In each of the studies, blood was drawn from patients and controls alike and tested for DDE, the major break-down product of DDT, and for PCBs. DDT and PCBs were widely used in the United States until the 1970s and accumulate in the body's fatty tissues and thus can be found in human blood and breast milk many years after exposures. The principal author of the analysis, Francine Laden, Sc.D of Brigham and Women's Hospital (http://www.brighamandwomens.org/) The second author, Gwen Collman, Ph.D., of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said, "The investigators used a standardized approach to data analysis across all five studies and we did not find a consistent association in the various subgroups we looked at: Caucasian women, African-American women, women of various body mass and lactation histories." Brigham and Women's Hospital is a 716-bed affiliate of Harvard Medical School (http://hms.harvard.edu/) |
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